


That's Not How It Goes In the Movies

by zigostia



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Crack, Dinner, M/M, dan is a hot mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 17:21:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13252971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zigostia/pseuds/zigostia
Summary: Dan attempts to woo Phil with a romantic candlelit dinner. It doesn't work.





	That's Not How It Goes In the Movies

The first thing he noticed was the smell.

Wafting, curling, and striking out hard, sickeningly sweet and _dripping_ all over the flat.

Phil pulled a face and made a noise of disgust.

The next thing he noticed—or, rather, the next thing he heard—was a loud _bang!_ followed by a string of swears black and blue.

“Er—” Phil ventured a step into their flat, cringing as the scent invaded his nostrils. “Dan?”

The chorus of curses abruptly stopped for half a second, then started up again, even louder, accompanied by a pittering of footsteps.

“Phil!” Dan shrieked, barrelling straight towards him. Phil let out a yelp and stumbled back out into the hall.

“Don’t come in yet!” Dan took in a breath to speak, and then he wrinkled his nose. “Eugh. What in the world—” Pause, more cursing, something about a spill.

Phil looked at Dan with wide eyes.

Dan’s hair was wild curls, dark at the tips, and apparently defied the laws of physics, tumbling over his eyes and sticking up and out. His face was splattered with something vaguely shiny—along with the rest of him. His hands were in oven mitts, and—were they _smoking?_

“Dan,” Phil said faintly.

Dan jerked his head up and seemed to be surprised that Phil was still there.

“Oh.” He looked down at himself. “Ah.”

Dan took a deep breath and rearranged his features.

“Phil,” he said afterwards, in a tone that was significantly less chaotic. “Hi!”

“Hi.”

“You’re early.”

“No I’m not.”

“You said you’d be back at five.”

“It’s 4:52.”

“That’s not five.”

Phil nodded. “I should’ve known I’d arrive eight minutes earlier and tell you beforehand.”

Dan furrowed his eyebrows, scowled, and then had the decency to look sheepish.

He raised a hand to run through his hair.

“Ow!”

And Phil would laugh if he weren’t so confused.

“Sorry,” Dan said. “It’s just that I’m, uh, doing… something… just come in. But can you wait in the bathroom or something—” Dan grimaced. “What if you just gimme like a minute. Actually like ten minutes. Actually—” He stopped and grimaced again. “Okay, nevermind. Just come in.”

“Actually!” Dan blurted when Phil took a small step in. “Can you stay outside? Wait, no, that’s stupid, you’re gonna make him wait in the halls? Come on, Dan…” Dan shook his head and tried to wring his hands with oven mitts on.

“Uh,” he said, and looked at Phil helplessly.

“I can wait out here,” Phil said, finding this whole situation like a bit of a dream. One of those dreams where purple cats were flying around and bumping into each other with cheesy sitcom sound effects.

“You can? Okay!” Dan shut the door immediately.

Phil blinked. “Alright,” he said.

He turned, leaning his back against the door.

Two seconds later the door opened again and he fell onto a very high-strung Dan, who screamed and toppled over.

They landed in a pile of lanky arms and legs on the floor, which was sticky for some reason that Phil both really wanted to know and really didn’t want to know—along with everything else that was happening. Dan made incoherent stammering noises as they tried to untangle themselves.

“Oh, bloody hell, this isn’t—” Dan helped Phil up. “I forgot to tell you something.”

“Right,” Phil said, dazed. “What is it?”

Dan froze for a moment and cursed again.

“Nevermind,” he muttered, face as red as the oven mitts.

Phil watched Dan for a moment, and then he wordlessly nodded and stepped back, allowing his very flustered flatmate to close the door.

Leaning against the wall next to the door this time, he took a deep breath and tried to browse on his phone with little success. Occasionally, bits and parts of words—mostly curses—emitted out from inside the flat.

Five minutes later, the door opened next to him.

“You can come in now.”

Dan peeked out, looking so entirely different than he had five minutes prior that Phil’s mind screeched straight to a stop.

His hair was unstraightened, but the curls had been tamed and combed down. His rumpled attire had been swapped out for a simple dark shirt.

“I said you can come in.”

Phil jolted slightly, and nodded.

His feet made sticky noises along the floor.

“Sorry,” Dan muttered. “Spilled…”

“A whole lot of cologne,” Phil said wryly, twitching his nose.

Dan’s ears were tinted pink. “Yeah.”

Thankfully, the spill seemed to be concentrated near the doorway only, and left only a faint linger as they entered the living room.

Which…

“Dan,” Phil said.

“Dinner,” Dan said, not meeting Phil’s eyes. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

“It is. It was.”

Dan looked over fleetingly, with a small smile. “The execution didn’t exactly go as I had predicted.”

Phil laughed. “I think it made it better,” he said with a smile. “Well, come on, then. Dinner?”

“Right!” Dan jumped, a little of that jittery, chaotic side showing again.

_Where did Dan get this tablecloth? And this… candle?_

“It’s scented,” Dan said, as if that explained everything.

 _Home Sweet Home_ it read, and Phil turned it around in his hands, nodded very, very slowly, and set it back down.

“I’ll get the food,” Dan said quickly. “And a lighter. For the candle.”

Another nod, and Dan scurried away.

Phil stared at the candle for a long time, thinking that this was one of his stranger dreams yet and wondering when the purple cats would come out.

Dan returned with two plates of some kind of pasta and a bottle of wine.

“Aglio e olio,” Dan said, placing down the plates.

“Bless you.”

Dan rolled his eyes. “It’s an italian dish. Garlic and oil.”

“Aglio e olio,” Phil repeated.

“Aglio e olio,” Dan confirmed.

“Aglioliolioliolio?”

“Ah, shut up.”

Dan uncorked the wine and poured it out. Phil read the label and paled.

“Dan, what in the world—”

“It’s nice wine,” Dan said.

“It’s not _nice,_ it’s—it’s bloody expensive!”

“Bugger off, it’s not like I used your debit card.”

“That doesn’t… why did you buy this?”

"Stop complaining that the wine's too good." Dan put down the bottle and took a lighter out of his pocket. He reached over for the candle and immediately knocked over a glass of just-filled,  _bloody-expensive_ wine.

“Oh…” Dan ran back to the kitchen, cursing like a sailor.

“I’ve got this!” he shouted. “Stay there!”

Phil stayed, staring at nothing in particular, and lighted the candle just to have something to do. It was awfully tall and looked like it could topple over if you breathed on it the wrong way.

Dan came back with a handful of napkins and frantically scrubbed them into the spill. The tablecloth had turned light red (and _yes_ , there was a difference between light red and pink, thank you very much.)

“Oh, hell.” Dan dropped the pile of soggy napkins into the middle of the table and pouted.

“It’s alright,” Phil shrugged. “The tablecloth is there for a reason.”

Dan sighed, and settled down into his own chair.

He took a deep breath, clasped his hands together, and leaned in, looking at Phil intently.

“Can we pretend none of that happened?”

The corner of Phil’s mouth tugged itself up. “Okay.”

“Good.” Dan closed his eyes for three seconds, and when he opened them again, they were cool and unwavering.

“Thank you for joining me at this lovely dinner that you came into without any setbacks or complications whatsoever, would you like some more wine, as it seems to appear that you’ve already finished your glass?”

Phil burst into uncontrollable laughter. Dan kept a straight face for half a second before breaking into an impish grin.

“Yes, that would be wonderful,” Phil said, still giggling.

Dan poured some more wine, very deliberately raising his elbow high above his own glass.

“Try the Aglio e olio,” Dan said.

Phil twirled some onto his fork and tried it.

It was…

“Good,” Phil said.

Dan narrowed his eyes, and groaned quietly.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s good!” Phil protested.

“No, it’s obviously not good,” Dan muttered. He stabbed some of his own and tried it.

“Oh.”

Very calmly, Dan lifted his plate and placed it to the side, and then dropped his head down onto the table where it landed with a _thunk._

It took Phil a moment to realise that he was laughing, his shoulders shaking silently.

“Dan…?”

Dan lifted his head. “I forgot the garlic,” he said, and his head went back down again.

“You—what?”

_“It’s just olio now.”_

There was a pause.

“Olioliolio?” Phil suggested.

“Shut up.” Dan stood up from the table, flushed and grinning. “I’ll go get some garlic powder. It won’t be as good as fresh, but it’s better than nothing.”

Phil sipped the wine, which was ridiculously good.

As they stirred their separate garlic dust into their plates, he wondered, very calmly, what in the everloving hell was going on.

Phil took some noodles into his fork and stuffed it into his mouth. He was pleasantly surprised.

“Good,” he said, and he wasn’t lying this time.

Dan tried his own, and made a satisfied noise. He pointed his fork at Phil. “Can we pretend that didn’t happen, either?”

Phil laughed.

The rest of the dinner passed without an incident—surprisingly. Phil said “Aglio e olio” about fourteen more times and Dan had about four cringe attacks, and they bickered about who was going to do the dishes, the argument devolving into whose hands were more sensitive to dish soap and then which one of them was the messiest, and somewhere along the line they began hotly debating the pigeons that were being fed through the window who seemed awfully close to being brave enough to enter the flat because _some_ body kept playing bird noises to lure them in, and then the entire argument fell apart and they forgot what they were talking about in the first place.

In the end, the candle had dripped a puddle into the tablecloth, which had dried with the light-red stain and would then probably remain light-red for the rest of its lifetime, and both men were pleasantly full, enough wine in their system to bring up a faint buzz.

“So what’s all this, then?” Phil finally asked as the dinner came to an end. He probably should’ve asked a long time ago. “Why this dinner?”

Dan shrugged. “What, I can’t make my—my best friend a dinner?”

Phil tilted his head with scrutiny. “No, something’s up.” He raised his eyebrows. “Is it a good thing? Is this a celebration?”

“Depends.”

“What? On what?”

“Nothing,” Dan muttered, tapping his fingers on the table. “It’s nothing.”

There was a tension in the air that wasn’t there before.

“You know you can tell me anything,” Phil prodded.

“Not…” _Not this_ went unspoken.

Phil bit his lip. Perhaps it was the wine, but he felt bolder than usual. “Did you break something? My camera? I promise I won’t be mad.”

Dan shook his head, a stubbornness set in his jaw.

A thought popped into Phil’s mind, one that made his heart twist. “Are you moving out? Is that why?” Dan had joked about it before, but Phil had never even considered that he’d actually—

A violent shake of Dan’s head. “Don’t be stupid, Phil, I would never leave.”

“Oh.” The relief swamped him. “What is it, then?”

“Nothing,” Dan said again.

“We both know it’s not that,” Phil snapped slightly.

“Can you please just drop it?”

“Not after all this! You can’t just… pull out a dinner out of nowhere and not tell me why!”

“It’s nothing,” Dan said vehemently. “It was… it was a stupid thing. Spur-of-the-moment.”

“Doesn’t seem very much like it,” Phil said dryly, looking at the candle and the wine and the tablecloth, which, now that he thought about it, they didn’t own before.

“Okay, well, I’m over it, now, so let’s just forget this whole thing and move on.” Dan’s voice was almost pleading, but Phil wasn’t going to hear it.

“Just tell me, Dan!”

“No!”

“Why not! For god’s sake, just spit it out!”

“I’m in love with you!”

“Alright! I—wait, what?”

Dan stood up and banged his knee hard against the table. The cutlery rattled and things toppled over, but Phil didn’t bother looking at the damage, instead getting up and following Dan, who was making a beeline to the door.

“I like you more than a flatmate, more than a friend, more than best friends, I want you as so much more than that and I was going to tell you, tell you that I love you and that I want you, so much it scares me and that’s exactly _why_ I didn’t want to tell you, but this isn’t how I wanted things to go, I’ve ruined it and now it’s all going to _shit_ and even my _fucking_ confession isn’t going the way I wanted it to, _that’s_ what I wanted to tell you, Phil, _that’s_ precisely it, thank you very much.”

Dan spoke in rapid-fire, the words striking Phil like bullets.

He opened the door. He didn’t even have his coat on.

 _“Now_ do you get why I didn’t want to tell you?” he spat.

Phil didn’t say anything. He couldn’t say anything.

Dan’s expression turned stormy. “Yeah, thought so,” he muttered, and shut the door.

-+-+-+-

Phil doesn’t know how long he’s been staring at the door.

His train of thought seems to have skidded off the rails and crashed, leaving nothing but a train wreck of pure pandemonium.

Dan was— _what? what?_

Dan was in love with him.

_Oh my god._

“Wait!” Phil cries out to the door, who doesn’t respond.

Phil scrambles for his coat, which he doesn’t even bother stopping to put on, fumbling for the zipper while he runs down the hallway. He doesn’t take the elevator, doesn’t want to wait; he flings open a door and pounds down the stairs.

Running, running. His breathing comes in quick puffs, his mind whirring, stuck on one single thought—one single person.

He reaches for his pocket, texts: _where are you??_

He stares at the screen, waiting, watching—

He collides into something and they both go down.

“Oi!”

Phil scrambles up and looks at the man he just ran into, and he allows a tiny sliver of his mind to go off thinking about Dan to think about this.

The landlord scowls and looks at Phil with confusion. “What are you doing here, son?”

“I, uh.” Phil’s phone has been knocked down to the floor, and he picks it up.

Message read.

Phil’s heart stutters.

“I’m so sorry,” Phil manages to say, and then, “see you later!”

He turns and runs away, keeping his eyes on the screen, although he should really know better now.

One split second of typing—

It disappears.

“Come on, Dan,” Phil hisses. _Please,_ he adds, and sends it.

Message read. A few seconds where Phil’s heart furiously beats out of his chest.

Nothing.

Phil very nearly growls with frustration. He shoves his phone back into his pocket and continues on running.

Dan couldn’t be far, he tries to console himself. _He can’t run_ he thinks, and he would laugh but he doesn’t, he just keeps on running and running, out the front doors and down the snowy streets. His breath comes out in clouds. People avert their gaze and carry on, no one stopping their daily commute to question the tall man sprinting down the street like he’s being chased within an inch of his life—that’s London for you, and for once he’s thankful.

He skids to a stop at scarlet street lights, swings his head wildly from left to right to straight ahead.

He racks his mind, _wherewherewhere,_ there must be something, somewhere—

 _“Oh,”_ he says out loud, and the streetlights turn to green.

He takes the left without hesitation, hitching up his speed once again, now with a clear destination in mind.

Another left. Straight ahead. Turn right and step up onto the entrance of the trail, a small forest in a small park. Paved cement turns to snowy grass and dirt beneath his feet.

_“This is where I go when I want to be alone,” Dan told him. “It’s very remote. Peaceful. Like a secret hiding place.”_

_Phil nodded, looking around. It was_   _peaceful—there are no bustling crowds, no constant commotion of cars. Just trees and snow and a lonely bench._

_Then Phil frowned. “But now that you’ve told me, it’s not really a secret anymore.”_

_Dan smiled. “Ah, but I want you to know it. It’s where I go when I_ say _I want to be alone, but I actually do want somebody to find me—and that somebody has to be you, doesn’t it?”_

Phil feels his chest actually _throb,_ a physical reminder of a heartache that he doesn’t need anymore, not that Dan—

Dan is sitting on the bench, his head in his hands.

Phil feels the name crawl up his throat:

_“Dan!”_

Dan doesn’t even move, and the exhaustion finally catches up to Phil, who puts his hands on his knees and looks down at his boots, breathing hard.

“I love you too,” Phil says, but he’s so out of breath that it comes out as a ragged whisper that Dan doesn’t hear.

Phil trudges closer. “I love you too,” he says.

“I love you too.”

Dan raises his head, something fragile in his expression.

“I love you too.”

He stands, his eyes widening with something akin to an epiphany.

“I love you too,” Phil says, and takes Dan’s face in his hands and kisses him.

Dan doesn’t react for long enough for Phil to wonder if he’s made a horrific miscalculation.

Just as he’s about to draw back, Dan’s hands entwine into Phil’s hair and he kisses him back with a soft and earnest desperation.

And it’s _everything._

Phil grabs onto one of Dan’s hands and laces their fingers together. Every single part of him is buzzing, thrumming with electricity.

“I love you too,” Phil pulls back very, very slightly, whispers against his lips.

Dan moves, gently bumps his nose against Phil’s. “I love you too,” he says back.

“I love you three?”

Dan laughs softly. “Git,” he says affectionately.

“You’re the one who pulled off an entire dinner only to get cold feet at the very end.”

“A dinner where everything went wrong,” Dan mutters. “It seemed immaculate in concept.”

“I think it went pretty immaculately,” Phil says, and leans in to kiss him again.

Dan wraps his arms around Phil’s waist and tugs him down onto the bench. Happily settling down, Dan leans his head against his shoulder.

“I thought you knew,” Phil murmurs, holding Dan close (and it feels so  _natural,_ of course they love each other, how could they not?)

Dan sounds incredulous. “How could I possibly have known?”

“I… I don’t know,” Phil relents. “I’m just glad I got it out of you. Imagine if I just let you off.”

“We’d both die of frustration and the sheer effort of repressing our emotions?”

Phil giggles. “Yeah, probably.”

They fall silent, here, and watch the snow fall. There is no sound other than their breathing, and, if you listen closely enough, a distant rumble of London’s constant noise.

After a peaceful while, Phil speaks up, voice hushed, hesitant to break such a moment.

“The dinner, oh my god. You had a candle and everything.”

“Oh, the _candle._ I swear it was going to topple over if I even touched it.”

The air of tranquility shatters.

Phil sucks in a breath.

Dan pauses. “What?”

Realisation crosses his face a second later.

“Oh no,” they say simultaneously, and they run.

“You knocked over the _fucking_ candle, didn’t you!” Dan shouts as they sprint through the path.

“No, it was you!” Phil retorts hotly.

“You should’ve noticed!”

“You had just told me that you were in love with me, what, so I was supposed to just hear that and also have enough free space in my mind to look at the table?”

“To notice that the table was on fire, yes!”

“Don’t jinx it! It might not be on fire!”

“I’m not jinxing it, _you’re_ jinxing it!”

“Shut up!”

They dash across London all the way to their flat, where Dan points out that there isn’t a parade of ambulances and fire trucks or smoke pouring out their window, so it can’t be _that_ bad.

It isn’t—the poor tablecloth is rendered unreusable and is thrown into the bin, which would probably had happened either way, what with the red wine and all. There is a small scorch mark on the dinner table, but, as Phil says, it gives it “character”.

“So who’s doing the dishes?” Dan says, and then, “Oh! _That’s_ what—

“What we were arguing about,” Phil finishes. “And the answer is _you,_ by the way.”

“What makes that fair?!”

And they go off again.

In the end, they decide on leaving them in the sink to “soak” overnight (which, strangely, is what they always end up doing), but as they walk into the kitchen, they are greeted with a much bigger problem.

“Wow,” Phil says, standing right at the edge of the kitchen.

“Yeah.” Dan clicks his tongue. “Now you see why I panicked when you came early?”

_“Ten minutes.”_

“Eight.”

"Oh, yeah, that makes a huge difference.”

“I could’ve brushed my hair or something, looked less of a hot mess.”

“You’re always a hot mess.”

“Mm.” Dan smirks. “You’re _half_ right.”

Phil blushes. “Let’s just figure out how we’re going to clean this up.”

Dan yawns and waves a hand. “Later. Leave it to soak until the morning.”

“We’re gonna need a much bigger sink,” Phil says, and he moves in to plant a kiss on Dan’s cheek, just because he can.

Dan compensates with a kiss on Phil's nose, and leans in so that their foreheads are touching.

“I still can’t believe this,” he admits.

“I planned a perfect dinner,” Dan says. “I was going to confess my feelings about you in the end in this long speech that I rehearsed in my mind, like, eighteen times.”

“Say it now,” Phil says quietly.

Dan swallows, and takes one of Phil’s hands, squeezing lightly.

“When we first met—”

There is a pounding at the door.

“Oh, come on— _Fuck off!”_  Dan hollers to the entrance.

The knocking stops.

“Excuse me?”

Dan freezes, and the look he gives Phil is so mortified that Phil can’t help it, he starts to giggle.

“That was… I was saying that to my friend!” Dan shouts, and then—“my _boyfriend!”_

Phil’s entire body goes tingly and warm.

“Yeah, we’re having a fight!” Phil yells, and then, for good measure, “I hate you, Dan!”

Except it doesn’t come out very convincing. Phil winces and Dan stifles a laugh.

The voice is confused and accusing. “What is going on, boys? I saw one of you—you ran into me!”

Dan frowns, and raises an eyebrow. “Care to explain?”

“I’ll be there in a moment!” Phil calls out, and then he lowers his voice.

“That speech,” he says to Dan. “I’m going to hear it." His expression turns sheepish. "After I sort this out.”

Dan grins. “You ran into the landlord? I can’t believe you. That, added to the state of the kitchen, and we’re going to have to move out.”

It's been at least ten minutes since they ran, but Phil still feels breathless. He presses his lips to Dan's forehead, gathering him close.

“We’ll find a new flat together. We can have another dinner, and you can give me the speech then.”

“And then?”

“And then… and then anything. Everything.”

“Everything,” Dan echoes.

Phil kisses Dan, leaving the promise on his lips.

**Author's Note:**

> Of course I'm writing fanfiction instead of studying for my finals ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


End file.
